No One Saw How Or When Arne Nicolaysen Went Overboard

The Astonishing Story Of A Seaman Who Was Alone In The Ocean For A Day and Two Nights With No Life Jacket, Food, Water Or Anything To Hold On To

Reading the story entitled “Man Overboard” about Arne Nicolaysen in Robert Littell’s 1961 book It Takes All Kinds (Reynal & Compnay) you come to the realization that some human beings are incredibly resilient.

Nicolaysen was able to survive an agonizing 29 hours in the ocean without any flotation device, food or water, while sharks kept approaching him. The fact that it was hours before anyone on his ship discovered that Nicolaysen was missing, made his rescue seem even more unlikely. Between 15 – 20 ships passed by without hearing his calls for help or spotting him bobbing up and down in the endless expanse of the ocean.

Nicolaysen’s story is frightening, dramatic and ultimately inspiring.

Littell’s book is now in public domain so we’re reprinting the incredible short story below.

On Monday, the day after Christmas, 1955, there came a  telegram for Mrs. Lilly Nicolaysen, who lived alone in a little  house at Hoybraaten, just outside of Oslo. Two of her children were married; the youngest, Arne, like so many other Norwegian boys, had gone to sea when he was sixteen. Of the last ten Christmases, he had spent seven far from home.

The telegram was from the captain of the Hoegh Line’s motorship Silverspray, and it read:

SEAMAN ARNE NICOLAYSEN OVERBOARD CHRISTMAS EVE OFF FLORIDA COAST ON THE VOYAGE FROM NEW ORLEANS TO PHILADELPHIA . . .

Every word fell like a sledge hammer upon Mrs. Nicolaysen’s heart.

. . . ALL SHIPS ALERTED BUT FURTHER SEARCH HOPELESS AS DO NOT KNOW WHEN ACCIDENT OCCURRED.

Her family tried to comfort her and one another. Her six- year-old grandson said, “Arne’s not lost in a few weeks we’ll see him standing in the doorway.” Her daughter kept insisting, “He’s such a good swimmer, and he’s never been afraid of the water. Of course they’ve picked him up by now!” But all of them felt shadowed by the wings of death.

When the message was sent, Arne Nicolaysen was still in the water, and he was to be there many hours more in all, twenty-nine hours before he was picked up.

Twenty-nine hours alone in the ocean, without a life belt, without water, watch, or compass; without so much as an orange crate to cling to or an orange rind to suck; twenty-nine hours of swimming, floating, dog-paddling, resting, struggling, hoping, despairing, praying, sleeping a bit until his mouth filled with salt water; twenty-nine hours of seeing ships go by out of sound, out of reach almost as many ships as there were hours.

When I met him a few weeks later, I found his survival a bit easier to understand, but only a bit. Arne Nicolaysen is a powerfully built young fellow, of less than average height, but with much more than average barrel to the chest and muscle on the arms. He has the self-sufficient, quiet poise of a man twice his age. Thick, wavy red hair pours over his head in a sort of groundswell; his face crinkles with sudden laughter; his sharp, up-tipped nose cleaves the air like the prow of a ship. There’s a rake to his hat, and a set to his jaw, and a light in his eye, that say, “I love life and intend to live it.”

He is also an example of the career sailor of today, a sailor who banks his pay, doesn’t smoke, holds his liquor, and watches his step. “I’m careful always,” Arne says, in his colloquial, self-taught English. “I think before I’m speaking, I look both sides of the street before I cross.” Aboard the Silverspray, he often had to scold the seventeen-year-old deck boy, Vidar Ostgaard, for sitting so nonchalantly on the rail.

Several recent mishaps stuck in his mind like red warning flags: the Norwegian lost overboard in the Red Sea; the ship-mate Arne himself had saved from a treacherous current while swimming in the harbor of Bombay.

So Arne Nicolaysen will never understand how he, of all people, went overboard that Christmas Eve.

The weather was warm, the sea calm, and the Silverspray somewhere between Florida and Cuba, when a long, rather sedate Christmas party began. There were red and white balloons, a tree “with snow and glitter,” old Norwegian Christmas songs, parcels for all hands given out by the captain.

And plenty to eat. “I had the second biggest appetite on the ship,” confesses Arne with a grin, “and I had a little bit of extra weight. It’s good in case of war.”

But there wasn’t much drinking. “Not with the officers present,” explained Arne. Toward eleven or half-past, when he went down to his cabin, he was quite sober. He kicked off his shoes and lay back on his bunk thinking of the snow around his mother’s house, of her and the rest of the family, “trying to figure out the picture of what they’re doing.” He was pensive, relaxed, a little sad. . . .

“The next thing I knew,” says Arne, “I was in the water.” It’s another dream, he thought, and I must wake up so he lunged out with both fists against the bulkhead, as he had often done before to break the spell of a nightmare.

But instead of wood, his fists smacked into water. Like the fingers of a drowning man, his own emotions seized him by the throat. He was shocked, angry, incredulous, outraged, panicky, all at the same time. Desperately he swam toward nowhere in particular, thrashing the waves in confused fury at this stupid trick that he had played upon himself, calling again and again upon the blank night: “Help! Help! Man overboard. . . . Help!”

Suddenly, something flashed into his mind: a magazine article in Det Beste about a boy who had fallen overboard.  Arne had also read it in English in The Reader’s Digest. The boy couldn’t swim, but he had kept afloat and alive by remembering what his captain had said during boat drill: “If you ever get in a tight spot, keep your head, and think!”

“When that article came to my mind,” says Arne, “I stopped yelling and banging the water; I slowed down and looked around.” That was it; think, keep cool, take stock, plan.

The water was not too cold for a man with some fat under his hide. But he would have to keep in motion. The night was black, and only an occasional star blinked between cloud and cloud. If he started to swim steadily toward what? he might exhaust himself going in circles. He had no idea from which quarter of the darkness to expect the Silverspray if she should turn back to search for him.

But had he yet been missed? As on so many Norwegian ships nowadays, he shared a cabin with only one other seaman. The messboy would not rap on their door until seven, perhaps even later because of the holiday. As it turned out, he was not missed. Progress and social welfare were against him. In an old-fashioned crowded forecastle, his empty bunk would soon have been remarked.

It was now probably close to midnight. Seven or eight hours times the ship’s seventeen knots . . the mental arithmetic was easy, and appalling. There was only one sensible thing to do: keep afloat until it was light enough for some other ship to see him a tiny redheaded speck in a blue immensity of ocean.

There was a long, gentle swell, and on one score Arne was not worried anyway: the hard work on board had put him in excellent shape; he was a strong, natural swimmer; the water had never frightened him. As a kid he had loved to jump into it from high up, before he could swim a stroke. On board ship he would dive off the highest place he could find, with his hands ”clasped together in one fist” to break the fall. Although he had learned a good breast stroke, he also liked to go through the water on all fours, like a dog.

Whatever he did until dawn would be easier without those neat gabardine slacks he had put on for the party. He was about to peel them off when a thought sent an icy finger down his spine sharks! These waters must be full of sharks. The year before, coming up the Caribbean from Venezuela, he had fished for sharks off a tanker and teased a shark with a broomstick. The shark’s V-trap jaws had snapped it off as if it were a banana.

Arne kept his trousers on. For sharks, though terrifying, are also surprisingly timid. Even a small noise, like the flip-flop of trouser cuffs, might frighten them away.

His socks would help too. Arne carefully pulled them half off, and all through his ordeal the rest of that night, and Christmas Day, and the next night he kept them dangling, flapping down beyond his toes like the arms of some limp underwater scarecrow.

A bitter dilemma was to haunt and torture him until the end: whether to keep in constant motion and use up his strength, or float and attract sharks. He’d have to compromise, to keep thinking, like the boy in the magazine article, the boy who was so much worse off, the boy who couldn’t even swim.

Arne had plenty of time to think in those first dark hours. “How could I fall overboard and not feel it?” he kept asking himself. He’d never been a sleepwalker: how could he have dreamed his way up and out on deck and over the rail? The cabin’s porthole? No, he had tried it once, when the ship was docked. One of his shipmates had squeezed through, but his own shoulders were too bulky.

Long after midnight, he saw a ship coming down toward him. Judging from all he could see of her in the dark, which was the constellation of her lights red and green on each wing of the bridge, white lights on the masts she was a tanker. But either she changed her course, or he had misjudged it, for she missed him by hundreds of yards. ”It looked” says Arne, “like when she sees me she turns away.”

The semitropical sun rose swiftly. It cheered and warmed him and in a little while showed him an ore ship’s silhouette. Calculating as best he could her speed, distance, and direction, Arne began to swim obstinately on a “collision course” that is, toward a distant invisible point, well ahead of the ore ship, where her fifteen knots an hour and his one or less might conceivably meet. A long time and a lot of precious energy later, he realized that the angle he had drawn in his mind would never close.

But at any rate he was in the shipping lane. In the next few hours four or five ships went by. Some seemed so near that Arne shouted, whistled, took off his T-shirt and waved it, a sodden, futile flag.

He lost count of the ships he saw that day between fifteen and twenty, he thinks all blind to him, deaf, unreachable. But there was one he will never forget. From her silhouette and the three red rings on her stack, he recognized her at once as a “sugar ship/* plying between Havana and New York. By swimming hard he came close enough to hear the fathom-deep throb of her propellers and to hope that someone would hear his shouts or see his waving shirt. But she too passed him by.

Arne – it explains why he is alive today – is the kind of fellow who gets angry when more mortal mortals feel only despair or fear. He shook his fist at the sugar ship’s stern and bawled out, for all the waves to hear, “If I’m saved I’ll report you to the company for not keeping a proper lookout!”

Not a single ship, that holiday, left any rubbish in its wake, for of course the deckhands were not working. Arne would have welcomed a friendly piece of unsinkable trash or a bit of half-eaten fruit.

He was weaker, more and more uncomfortable. The sun was slowly burning him; he was “stiff on the face” with salt. He had to keep massaging his legs. “If I get cramps,” he said to himself, “it is all finished.” When a jellyfish stung him he would raise his arms and spit on them scratching only made it worse.

His tongue was swollen, and his mind was haunted by thoughts and images of something to drink. “Buckets of nice cold water. A bottle of beer with ice drops down the side.”

The heat made him drowsy. More than once he woke up with his mouth full of salt water. Only the thought of sharks, the recollection of that broomstick, prevented him from sliding oftener away into sleep. He needed rest, but he never floated quite motionless. “Always I kept my feet going, and my toes.”

From time to time, when he thought he felt sharks nearby, he would “bang on the water” with his fists, or duck his head and yell wetly into the deep he had read somewhere that sharks don’t like to be shouted at.

The sun seemed to hang forever at the top of the cloudless sky. As ship after ship pricked his horizon with hope, only to become a pair of masts, then a smudge, then a heartache, it seemed to Arne Nicolaysen that this must be the longest and loneliest Christmas Day that ever a sailor had endured.

“I thought about everything that day,” he says now. “About my mother, my schoolmates. I saw pieces of my life. I jumped back and forth. I think I saw my whole life twice.”

Earlier that December, he had celebrated his twenty-fifth birthday. Now, as he dog-paddled in waves that were getting darker, colder, higher, he thought, “Is twenty-five all I’m ever going to be? Was that my last birthday?”

He had a notion that he’d feel better if only he could touch bottom. Several times he held his breath and shoved himself down, down, feet first. Yet he knew that he couldn’t have stayed there if he had found it.

When the sun had gone, says Arne, “I began to get mad and sad and I tried to drown myself.” Several times he ducked under and took in a great gulp of sea water. But “there was a banging in my ears, and it all came up again.” He found out how hard it was to vomit while swimming.

Late Christmas night he thinks by then time had lost its shape, and his mind had slipped its leash he saw his mother’s face before him. Then his sister’s, quite clearly. And though he said to himself, “You’re starting to get crazy,” he talked to her and asked her whether the water all around him was fresh or salt. “Sure, you can drink it,” she said; “you’re in the lake.” So he drank, and for a few moments he was so nearly out of his head that he thought the water fresh.

He saw two of his shipmates, “just like they were walking on the water.” One of them was the deck boy. “Why don’t you help me?” Arne asked. “Where is land?” “Swim toward the moonlight,” they answered, “and you’ll reach land.”

Arne began to splash his way down the silver track of the moon. It gave him an immaterial, shining rope to cling to. It also set him a course which probably, by sheer accident, saved his life at last.

For suddenly he was jarred to alertness by the lights and outline of a ship coming straight at him. This was no vision, for he could hear the iron thumping of the engines. He swam quickly aside, and as the ship slid by, shouted, or screamed, again and again, “Help! Man overboard!”

Then he heard the “krrrring” of the telegraph on the bridge, and a sound that lifted his heart right out of the water: the “chu-chu-shsss” of engines slowing to a full stop.

There were shouts on deck, and a lifebuoy came sailing through the air toward him. It lit up when it hit the water. Arne swam over to it, and, he says, “I put my hands in it and lie out. Then I held up the light like this so they’d see my face.”

The ship which now lowered a boat for Arne was the tanker British Surveyor. His rescue was sheer luck, for the British Surveyor had not received the Silver spray’s warning. Her lookout had cried to the mate that a ghost was following the ship. The mate had heeded him, and heard Arne’s shouts for help.

“When they got me up on deck,” says Arne, “they asked me who I was and how long I had been in the water. ‘Since Christmas Eve Saturday night I told them. The captain and the mate looked at each other they thought I was out of my mind. ‘But this is Monday!’ they said, ‘a quarter past four of Monday morning!’ ”

Twenty-nine hours in the water. . . . When they fished him out, Arne’s hands were white, puffy and wrinkled, his arms hurt him horribly; his face was black; he was trembling with cold; but he could stand, and talk enough to ask the captain for a bucket of water. The captain sensibly gave him only a thimbleful, put him to bed, and sent a message to his mother.

Two weeks later Arne Nicolaysen was home, and almost recovered. His mother baked a cake; the Norwegian flag was hung out in his street; the neighbors came in to celebrate and presented him with a silver cup.

When I saw him a month later in Oslo, Arne was a bit bored with photographers and newspapermen, with all the letters from girls he’d never seen, with being famous simply for being still alive. He was restless, and eager to get another ship (the Silver spray by then was nearing some port in India), to continue his life of scrubbing decks, cleaning tanks, chipping paint, seeing strange harbors in hot countries.

“But next time I fall overboard/’ he said with a smile, “I will have in my pocket a small mirror to catch the sun and flash at all the ships that go by.”

Arne Nicolaysen later married and moved to Hamburg, Germany where he opened a sewing studio business. Though he had a longing to return to sea, his wife Heidi was never too keen on the idea.

The last profile on Arne Nicolaysen appeared in a Norwegian newspaper celebrating his 85th birthday in 2015.